The present invention relates to the field of document storage and retrieval. More specifically, one embodiment of the invention provides a document handler that includes document associations.
Documents that may have been efficiently handled in the past as paper documents are being replaced by electronic documents. There are several reasons for this. The costs of scanning and storing documents electronically are falling so much, relative to the cost of storing paper documents, that it will soon be uneconomical to store paper documents in bulk. In addition to storage costs, some document operations are considerably easier when the documents are in electronic form. For example, temporary or single use copies of specific documents can be made electronically, thus eliminating paper waste. If an electronic document is stored in a text searchable format, it can be easily searched. Even if it is not stored in text searchable format, it can be passed through an optical character recognition (OCR) process to generate searchable text, or it can be searched using more advanced techniques, such as those described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,465,353 and 5,717,940, each of which is incorporated by reference herein for all purposes.
Despite the advantages of the electronic form, the paper form of a document still has retained some advantages over conventional electronic documents. Often, it is hard for a person to mentally picture an electronic document, whereas a person can touch a paper document, crinkle it, or add it to a stack of papers on his or her desk. Paper documents have been preferred by some for purely aesthetic reasons, but have also been preferred where there is no electronic analogue to a paper document operation.
Some paper document operations have close analogues in electronic document processing, such as being copied, being stored in files (and files being stored within other files or within file cabinets), being viewed, or being moved around a (virtual) desktop. Other paper document operations have not heretofore had analogues in electronic document processing, such as being stapled. Stapling provides an association between the papers that are being stapled. The typical staple is removable, thereby making the association only semipermanent. However, other forms of “stapling” such as binding and ribbonning make for a more permanent stapling or association of a plurality of papers. Once stapled, a stack of papers can be manipulated as a unit as it is stored, transported or the like. Also, if a stack of papers is stapled, it is an indication that a paper document is complete and removed staples are generally observable on paper documents.